The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson (Random House)

Alex Berenson was a reporter for New York Times and has extensively covered the occupation of Iraq. He uses his experience and has created a story for post-911 America. The Faithful Spy is his book and it has won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. 

It is about an undercover CIA agent named John Wells, who has successfully infiltrated Al Qaeda before the events of 9-11. “After years of fighting jihad in Afghanistan and Chechniya, he spoke perfect Arabic and Pashtun, his beard was long, his hands calloused”.  He rode horses as well as any native Afghan, enjoyed the sport buzkashi, an Afghan version of polo but instead of using a ball, the objective of the game is to place a dead calf or goat in a goal. He played as hard as any Afghan.  “He prayed with them. He had proven that he belonged here, with these men”. He had also become a Muslim. The Taliban and Al Qaeda members call him Jalal.

The story begins a few months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. The story opens with Wells and a few of his jihadist friends being in the middle of a battle in Afghanistan. Their small group is planning on attacking Marines who are stationed nearby. Wells plans to take out his comrades and to try to get a message to his CIA handler.  

Around the same time that Wells was doing battle, Jennifer Exley, She was asked by her superiors to go to the U.S.S. Starker, which was sitting out in the Atlantic Ocean in international waters, “so its precious cargo would remain outside the jurisdiction of American courts”. 

Onboard the naval ship is just one prisoner. A young man named Tim Kiefer who went by the name of Mohammad Faisal. He was a twenty-two year old American who was fighting for the Taliban “against the United States”. The American public was aware of the capture of John Walker Lindh, which the media dubbed the American Taliban. Keifer’s capture was kept quiet and President Bush had signed an order declaring Kiefer an “enemy combatant”. Exley was here to question him about one other American - John Wells who has been incommunicado for the last two years.

The story progresses at a fast pace. Wells does manage to take out the terrorists who were his buddies and was taken in by the U.S. military where he gave them as much information as he could about what he had learned. He also writes a note and asks Major Holmes to make sure Jennifer Exley at the CIA gets his handwritten message. “Will pursue UBL. No prior knowledge of 9/11. Still friendly, John ”. 

John Wells is caught between two worlds. It is similar to the real-life situation of Agent Storm : My Life in Al Qaeda (reviewed in Asia by the Book, April 7, 2023). Unlike Mortem Storm in the real story, Wells goes back to the terrorist fold because he knows that the upper leaders are planning on something bigger than 9-11. He is determined to find out what and when will it happen. But little does he know, he is part of the plan as well… ~Ernie Hoyt

The Refugee Ocean by Pauls Toutonghi (Simon & Schuster, release date October 2023)

Marguerite has a passion for music and a gift for composing it. She is immersed in creating a sonata, one that she hopes may fulfill her deepest desire, a life that allows her to “live in music.” But instead she lives in the patriarchal culture of 1940’s Beirut and her father has charted her future. She will marry a man who will rescue and buttress her family’s dwindling fortune. One tiny fragment of possibility exists that might rescue her from this plan, along with a different avenue provided by a man she barely knows but who understands her better than anyone else in her life.

As a well brought up young Lebanese woman, Marguerite is smothered in a claustrophobic life. Her beauty is a prison. Her talent is ignored. She rebels in small ways: making her way alone in an opera house to meet a female singer whose freedom she longs to have for herself; accepting a cigarette from a woman who tells her to find a way to be herself; escaping the family house to go to her father’s place of business where she finally sees him as the flawed man he truly is. 

Naim is a child whose world is shattered to pieces when a bomb hits his home in Aleppo and sends him “twisting and spinning like a dead, dry falling leaf.” When he regains consciousness, he learns only he and his mother have survived the blast. Finding their way to a refugee camp, they are given asylum in the United States. But Naim has lost his greatest form of comfort. A musical prodigy in Syria, he can no longer find solace at a piano. His left hand was torn in half when he was caught in the maelstrom of the bombing. Now he feels useless, a drain upon his mother’s energy, a boy who can’t even keep a grip on the debit card that would buy groceries for the coming week.

Annabel Crandall is an elderly woman confined to a wheelchair in her large and comfortable home. With more space than she needs, she offers an apartment in her basement to a Syrian woman and her young son. When Annabel sees the child staring at her grand piano with a look of sorrow on his face, she becomes intrigued and when she finds him rifling through her kitchen pantry in search of food, she lures his story from him with a carton full of chocolate bars.

Naim isn’t the first Middle Easterner Annabel has met. When she was young and pretty, a contest took her to a tobacco plantation in Cuba, at a time when nobody realized the strength of the brewing revolution. Annabel was caught in the erupting violence, racing through the night to escape Castro’s guerrillas with a woman named Marguerite.

Each of these separate threads has the strength of a novel and when they intertwine, coincidences that border on the improbable have the power to overcome the bounds of strained credulity. Pauls Toutonghi has drawn upon the details of his own family’s history that make every setting, whether in the opulence of a Beirut opera house or in a refugee camp so huge that it contains four hundred stores, vividly alive. Toutonghi’s parents had lived in a refugee camp before arriving in the United States and he has dedicated this book to his cousin who has the same name as his character Marguerite Toutoungi. 

Two people who were forced to leave places they loved; two stories, one that ends happily; two unforgettable characters who provide an essential window on the never-ending history of those who seek asylum--The Refugee Ocean is a book that anybody with a conscience should read and take to heart.~Janet Brown

A Walk in the Darkness by Jon Land (Tor)

Jon Land is an American thriller writer. He has written two detective series - The Caitlin Strong novels about a fifth generation Texas ranger and the Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea series featuring a Palestinian Detective and an Inspector of Israel’s National Police. 

A Walk in the Darkness is the third book in the Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea series. The story opens with an incident that took place in Jerusalem in around 33 A.D. This relates to another incident which took place in Ephesus, Turkey almost 2000 years later.

“1948:  An archeological team in Turkey is slaughtered after making an earth-shattering discovery. More than fifty years later, a group of American archaeologists is murdered in the Judean desert”. 

Inspector Barnea is investigating a crime scene in the desert. A member of the Israeli Defense Force said he wasn’t expecting some from the National Police Force as the Judean desert falls under military jurisdiction. The Inspector informed the sergeant that it would be true if there were a security issue but the murder of foreign nationals is a civilian issue, unless terrorism is involved. However, the victims were part of an American archeological team who were invited at the request by the government of Israel. 

Fourteen people had been killed, shot at point blank range, in the back of the head. Twelve Americans and two others. She was given a list of the victims and was shocked to see the name at the bottom. It was a name she recognized, the nephew of Palestinain detective Ben Kamal. 

Detective Kamal was headed out to the Judean desert but was told by an Israeli army sergeant that he had entered a restricted area. Although he showed his ID and informed the Israelin army sergeant that he was there at the request of Pakad Barnea of the Israeli National Police Force. The sergeant refused to budge, insisting that his orders were to deny access to the area to all but those who have the proper authorization. Inspector Barnea intervened and Ben was allowed to pass.

Although Inspector Barnea told Ben that he was not there in an investigatory capacity, the death of Kama’s nephew sparked in him a need to find out more. There was one witness but nobody could understand what he was saying as he spoke in a dialect the Israeli’s were unfamiliar with, but it was a dialect that Ben’s father taught him when he was young. 

From what Ben could gather, the archeologists found something of great historic value. Barnea reluctantly recruits Kamal’s help in the investigation in which they discover more than just the discovery of an item that could change the world as we know it. But they discover a conspiracy that is an even greater threat to the Palestinain people and the entire West Bank. 

The Middle East remains one of the most volatile regions in the world. Tha Arab-Israeli issue remains at the heart of the conflict. Land’s depiction of both the Israelis and Palestinians put you in the heart of the region. Land’s latest story blends a bit of Dan Brown-like history as in The Da Vinci Code with current day politics in the Middle East. A fascinating blend of fact and fiction which will keep you on the edge of your seat. We can only hope that one day peace will come to the Middle East. ~Ernie Hoyt

Spirit of the Phoenix : Beirut and the Story of Lebanon by Tim Llewellyn (I.B. Taurus)

Tim Llewellyn is a British writer who was the British Broadcasting Company’s (BBC) Middle East correspondent based in Beirut for about ten years. He has covered the Lebanese Civil War, the Palestinian question, and was the first reporter to break the news of the massacre at Sabra and Chantila in 1982. 

Spirit of the Phoenix is Llewellyn’s treatise on Beirut and the country of Lebanon. Before you even begin to read, he provides a chronology of important dates and events in Lebanon’s history, followed by a list of leading figures in the country. We are introduced to the people who settled the country - the Maronites, the Druze, the Shia, and the Sunni. 

Lebanon is part of the Levant - an area of the Middle East which includes areas of Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, and Syria. It sometimes also includes current day Cyprus, Egypt, and parts of Turkey. 

“For all the beauty of its landscapes and the attractions of its people and culture, Lebanon has coursing through its enfeebled veins all the poisonous currents of international rivalries and regional aggression, and the religious and nationalistic fanaticisms these have engendered”, make this one of the most volatile regions in the world. 

Llewellyn hopes to explain that given all the animosity and strife that continues even to this day, how Lebanon and the Lebanese continue to survive. He has seen the changes in the country when Beirut was considered a modern and chic city and was still in the country when the Lebanese Civil War began. 

Llewellyn’s book is part travelogue, part history, and is also full of his personal anecdotes of what he has experienced living and working in the war-torn country. He revisits many of the places he has reported on and is able to talk to the people who still live there. He may not have the answer to the problems still facing the country, but he does help the reader have a better understanding of the region and its many problems. 

The most upsetting fact you will learn about the Levant is how the League of Nations divided up the Levant after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. There was a Mandate for Great Lebanon and Syria managed by France, and the Mandate for Palestine managed by the United Kingdom. It appears as if the two powerful countries were splitting the land as spoils of war. The creation of Israel on Palestinian soil in 1948 continues to be a sore point for the Palestians leading to creation of HAMAS and Hezbollah. 

Before I finished reading this book, I was shocked to discover how ignorant I was of Lebanon and the Middle East in general. The only thing I knew for certain was its location and that capital, Beirut, was once referred to as “Paris of the Middle East”. I was surprised to find that Lebanon had a large Christian population, the Maronites. As with a large number of people, my knowledge of the Middle East was divided into the Jewish state of Israel and the Arab countries surrounding it being Islamic. How wrong I was!

The only other thing I knew about Lebanon was that they made great food. I knew this because I used to live near a Lebanese restaurant during my university days. Whenever I’m asked, “What would be my ‘Last Supper’ I always answer, dejaj mashwi - Lebanese dish which is charbroiled chicken marinated in lemon and garlic and topped with a garlic sauce. It is also seasoned with allspice. 

Until the Middle East sorts out its differences without U.S. or other external interference, I’m afraid World Peace is still years from being achieved. ~Ernie Hoyt

Agent Storm : My Life Inside Al Qaeda by Mortem Storm (Penguin Viking)

Agent Storm is the fascinating story of the double life that Mortem Storm led until breaking his silence with the news media after one too many broken promises by the various agencies. Mortem Storm writes an eloquent story of how he went from becoming a radical islamist, then becomes disillusioned with their ideology, and finally finds himself working as a double agent for PET (the Danish Secret Service) as Storm is a Danish citizen, MI5, Mi6, and also the CIA. It comes as no surprise that not one of the Western intelligence was willing to go on record to confirm or deny their participation in the events Storm talks about. 

Many people may doubt the truth of his story but Storm includes copies of E-mails he exchanged with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-Yemini imam who also had ties to Al Qaeda, videos of a Croatian woman who wanted to marry the cleric, a number of encrypted mails from jihadists in Yemen and Somalia, records of money transfers to Somalia, text messages to the Danish secret police, and secret recordings he made with the various government agencies.

Storm takes us back to his beginnings in a town called Korsor in Denmark. His father was an alcoholic and deserted the family when Storm was still a child. He was abused by his step-father, became friends with his Arab neighbors in his apartment complex, and committed his first robbery when he was only thirteen. 

As he grew older, he became a member of the Bandidos, a notorious biker gang known for committing acts of violence, hardcore partying, drining, using and selling drugs, and other illegal activities. However, after beating a man with a baseball bat, he couldn’t get the moans of the man out of his head. He began to wonder what purpose his life had. It was around this time that he found himself in a library and began to read the story of the life of the Prophet Mohammad. This would change his life.

Storm was still partying even after officially converting to islam at the age of nineteen, even changing his name from Morten to Murad. After being arrested for the umpteenth time, he met a Danish muslim convert named Sulaiman while in custody. After his release, he moved to England with Sulaiman, and began to pray five times a day and grew a beard. He went to the Regent’s Park Mosque and was offered a scholarship to study Arabic and Islam at a school in Yemen. He marries a muslim woman and even names his son Osama, after the top leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden. 

He returned to Britain more radicalized than ever. In London, he meets Anwar al-Awlaki, who at one time was considered the number two man in Al Qaeda, after Osama bin Laden. His friendship with al-Awlaki leads him to befriend other like-minded jihadists. Over a ten year period, Storm would be involved in a network with jihadists in Britain, Denmark, Yemen, and Somalia. Storm was so impassioned to fight for the cause of Islam, he was willing to go to Somalia and help the Somali jihadists to fight the mostly Chrstian Ethiopian army. He had bought a one-way ticket to Mogadishu but before leaving, he was told by one of his comrades not to come. 

The defeatism of some of his muslim brothers began to make him question the Koran. The more doubts that crept into his mind, the more he felt he wasted ten years of his life. He began to think that perhaps his belief in Islam was flawed or was being distorted by men like al-Awlaki. After a lot of soul-searching, Storm makes another life-changing decision - he contacts a man who once gave him his business card after becoming “a citizen of interest”, the man being a member of the Danish secret police. 

And so begins his life as an informant. The intelligence Storm provides for the various agencies eventually leads to the involvement of the U.S. government-sanctioned assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki which was approved by President Barack Obama. In most news pieces, the U.S. took credit for dispatching one of the world’s most dangerous men from this earth but according to Storm, it was his intelligence and sources that helped the U.S. government. Of course the U.S. continues to remain silent on this particular point. 

If you are intrigued by international espionage, counter-terrorism, and making this world a safer place, forget James Bond and Modesty Blaise. You will be happy to know there was someone like Agent Storm to keep the world safe from terrorists. ~Ernie Hoyt

On the Front Line : The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin by Marie Colvin (Harper)

I really respect and admire people who are totally dedicated to their work. Especially those people who often make sacrifices of their own to help the more unfortunate. I believe that being a war correspondent is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Journalists put their lives at risk to bring news of atrocities committed around the world. I am referring to the journalists who make an effort to go into the heart of a conflict, not sit back in their comfortable hotels and report their stories secondhand from refugees, soldiers, and international aid workers. Marie Colvin was one of those people. 

Marie Colvin was an American who has been a war correspondent for the Sunday Times since 1986 when she covered the U.S. bombing of Tripoli in Libya. Since then, she has reported on conflicts around the world. She has covered the Iran-Iraq War, she stayed in Baghdad throughout the bombing during the first Persian Gulf War, she was also the first journalist to enter Kosovo from Albania with the Kosovo Liberation Army after the bombing by NATO planes.

She lost the sight of her left eye covering the conflict in Sri Lanka but that didn’t stop her from going back to other conflict zones after her recovery. She went back to the Middle East to report on the continuing problems facing Israeli-Arab relations, the departure of U.S. forces from Iraq and the resurgence of Al-Qaeda, on Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban fighting against Hamid Karzai’s government. She also sent dispatches from Iran, Egypt, and Libya, until she was killed in February of 2012 while covering the uprising in Syria. 

On the Front Line is a collection of her reports in the various conflicts she has covered. Several of the articles focus on the Middle East - the Iran-Iraq War, The Gulf War, Soviet Jews escaping persecution and finding refuge in Israel’s Occupied West Bank. She has interviewed Yassir Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and was one of the three remaining journalists in Dili, in East Timor where the United Nations were planning to pull out leaving hundreds of East Timorese to fend for themselves against the Indonesian army and militias. However, thanks to her reporting the U.N. reversed their decision to pull out. Colvin says, “I embarrassed the decision-makers and that felt good because it saved lives.”

Colvin’s long experience has taught her that most governments lie or distort the truth to cover up what they are really doing and the only way for the world to know is to go in and report what she sees. The Sri Lankan government was a case in point. The northeast part of the island was controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), a militant organization that fought to create an independent Tamil state because of the discrimination and violent persecution of them by the majority Sinhalese who dominated the Sri Lankan government. 

The ban against journalists going to the Tamil-held areas meant they could not speak with any of the leaders of the L.T.T.E. “even though the government was involved in negotiations with them through a Norwegian envoy to begin peace talks. The only news of the problems with those negotiations came from the government”. 

The ban also meant that reporters had no first hand accounts of the nearly half-million civilians living there, more than half of them being refugees. The people “were suffering under an economic embargo that the government denied existed.”. Colvin was the first foreign journalist to enter the Tamil-controlled area of Sri Lanka. After she filed her story and tried to make her way back to the government-held area, she was shot in the eye, thus the eyepatch that became her famous trademark. 

I am fascinated and repulsed by crimes against humanity. After Colvin’s narrow escape from Sri Lanka, she’s often asked if the risk was worth it. Some people call her brave while others say she must be stupid. Colvin responds to her critics and supporters alike. She says, “there’s no way to cover war properly without risk”. She doesn’t care about what kinds of planes were flown, what types of tanks were used or the size of the artillery being rained down. What she is most concerned about is “the experience of those most directly affected by the war, those asked to fight and those who are just trying to survive.” 

It amazes me as to how barbaric people can become. Colvin’s articles do not whitewash any of the facts - random killings, looting, rape, violence, torture, friendly neighbors turning on each other because they are of the wrong party or race. It appears it will take the world another millennia or more before all people realize that in war, it is the average citizen, young and old alike, who suffer the most. What the world truly needs are more people like Marie Colvin to continue writing the truth about the atrocities of war. ~Ernie Hoyt

Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell (Doubleday)

I was shocked and appalled at my utter lack of knowledge on the history of the modern Middle East. The area has been a hotbed of controversy and conflict since ancient times. However, the Middle East as we know it today was created after the end of World War I. 

Mary Doria Russell has created a novel in which a young school teacher comes into an inheritance and travels to Egypt and meets and interacts with a number of historical figures including Winston Churchill before he became Prime Minister, T.S. Lawrence, more commonly known as Lawrence of Arabia, and Gertrude Bell. Bob Hope makes a guest appearance as well. 

To be honest, I was familiar with Winston Churchill, only after he became Prime Minister. I had thought Lawrence of Arabia was a Hollywood creation, and I had no idea who Gertrude Bell was. But thanks to Mary Doria Russell’s meticulous research, I now know that before Churchill became Prime Minister, he was the Secretary of State for the Colonies and oversaw British foreign policy in the Middle East. That T.E. Lawrence was an actual person, and it was Gertrude Bell who was a notable person for helping to create the Kingdom of Iraq. 

Dreamers of the Day is narrated in the first person by Agnes Shanklin, an unmarried school teacher living in the Midwest and the eldest of three children. The time was 1918 when the “Great War and the Great Influenza fell on our placid world almost without warning”. Agnes’s family was not immune to the plague and she lost seven of her relatives including her sister and brother-in-law, Lillian and Douglas, their two young sons, her Uncle John, her mother, and her brother Ernest. 

Lillian, Agnes’s sister, had married a professor at a college they both attended and he was offered a post to teach at the American Mission School in Jebail in Syria, in what is today known as Byblos in the country of Lebanon. There, she met and became friends with T.S. Lawrence. It was in 1919 when Agnes’s sister called her and told her that she and her husband were taking her to a talk given by Sir Lawrence. It was after this that she and her family contracted the deadly virus. Agnes was the only one to survive.

After settling the affairs of three separate estates, Agnes found herself “with plenty of money and no family of my own to support” so she booked a passage and took the trip of a lifetime. She made reservations to stay at the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo. The year was 1921 the Semiramis Hotel was chosen as the site for the Cairo Peace Conference, a secret meeting held by British officials to partition the lands of the defeated Ottoman Empire and would become the nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan.

Into this world comes a single, middle-aged lady from Hawaii who finds herself in the company of celebrities and dignitaries alike. Agnes also finds romance, albeit with a married man who is a German and is Jewish as well. She surmises that he is a spy because she is taken in by his charm and chivalry.

Russell’s story is as entertaining as it is educational. It teaches us the rich history of the Middle East but it also sheds light on the arrogance and condescension against natives by the core of the British bureaucracy. Russell has one of her characters state, “They believe that freedom is an object to be delivered, like a parcel that arrives in the post.” 

The rebuttal by Agnes Shaklin is priceless as she replies, “They must surely know what freedom isn’t. It isn’t having British troops all over their land. It isn’t taxation without representation”. A major point for a lesson in American history. 

Unfortunately, the Middle East is still a land full of conflict. The Palestinians have yet to be given their own nation, the Kurds are still nationless as well. It may be another millennia before anybody sees any real changes in the Middle East. We can only hope. ~Ernie Hoyt

Wanting Mor by Rukhsana Khan (Groundwood Books)

Rukhsana Khan is a Canadian children’s book writer who was born in Lahore, Pakistan and currently lives in Toronto, Canada. She writes mostly about Muslim culture and the Middle East.

Wanting Mor is set in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Jameela is a young girl and a devout Muslim whose mother is her inspiration. She was born with a cleft lip and because of that she didn't have many friends. Her father is originally from Kabul and is currently helping to build a new road for the rural village that they live in. 

The story opens with the death of Jameela’s Mor, the Pushto word for mother. Without her mother’s guidance, Jameela doesn’t know what will become of her life. There is no school in her war-torn village so she can not read or write. Jameela often avoided her Baba, the Pushto word for father. He had an unpredictable temper and didn’t like the way he would look at her lip, “like somehow it was my fault I was born this way.”

A few days later as Jameela is doing the laundry, her father returns from work and says to pack up everything and tells her they’re leaving. He tells her he sold all their belongings and said they were moving to Kabul. Jameela couldn’t protest and the only thing she was able to take with her was a bundle of her wet clothes and a comb. 

She does manage to say goodbye to her Mor at her gravesite. Jameela who has never left her village feels that she can hear her mother saying, “Remember the man who asked the Prophet (peace be upon him) for advice. What did the Prophet (peace be upon him) tell him?”  “Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry.”

Her father takes them to a house where Jameela is immediately put to work. She can see her father getting money from the man who owns the house. The man’s wife first tells her to clean the pots in the kitchen. They need scrubbing but Jameela who has never lived in the city has never seen soap. The dishes are done by using ash. Jameela doesn’t know what soap is, she can’t believe that you can get water inside the house and don’t need a hauling bucket. 

Jameela tries her best to please the woman of the house. She quickly learns how to use a gas stove, how to use water and soap to scrub pots. What she can’t get used to is seeing her father act the way he does - drinking alcohol, getting drunk, dancing with another man’s woman at a party. She has to keep reminding herself - “Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry.” It becomes her mantra of sorts. 

Things do not work out at the house but Jameela’s father already had a new plan in motion. He drags Jameela to another house and tells her, “Jameela, this will be your new mother”. Jameela’s new stepmother is even more demanding than the previous woman. The mother treats her like a slave and doesn’t like her. Finally, one day, Jameela’s father takes her to a busy market with him. He tells her he needs to do something, then abandons her there. 

What becomes of Jameela is tragic and yet inspiring. A kind-hearted man takes her to an orphanage where she at least has a temporary home, makes friends and learns how to read and write. She is a testament to her faith and convictions. Her Mor always remains in her heart. Mor was her mentor, her role model, her pillar of strength. Now with no mother, and no father too, Jameela must face the world on her own. Her mother always told her, “If you can’t be beautiful you should at least be good.” She takes this advice to heart and endures a countless number of hardships before an orphanage takes her in. 

The author, Rukhsana Khan says that although the story is fiction it was based on an actual incident. She read a report on children in crisis that was issued by Afghanistan’s department of orphanages. In the report, it mentioned the story of a girl named Sameela. Her mother had died during the war, her father remarried and the new stepmother didn’t want her, so the father took her to the marketplace and left her there. 

It’s so sad to hear of reports like this and at times I found it irritating how governments refer to civilian deaths as “collateral damage” but the statistics doesn’t include the hundreds, if not thousands, of children, who are left as orphans. And the actions of the father in this story is as repulsive as the true life report. When will world leaders learn, “in war, there are no winners” or as the United Nations tweeted on their official Twitter account, “There are no winners in war, but countless lives will be torn apart.” ~Ernie Hoyt